Search shifts for missing Malaysia Airlines jet

DavidWinning

SYDNEY--The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 moved closer to Australia's coastline, underscoring continuing uncertainty over where the plane may have gone down in the southern Indian Ocean.

Charts released by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority put Wednesday's planned search area around 1,490 kilometers (925 miles) west of the Western Australian state capital of Perth.

The move follows earlier unsuccessful efforts by a multinational group of military aircraft and ships to scour seas for possible plane debris closer to what authorities believe was Flight 370's final flight path.

On Tuesday, the Australian former military chief leading the hunt for Flight 370 aimed to damp expectations that search teams would find any wreckage in the coming days, saying it wasn't completely certain they were looking in the right place.

"We are working from a very uncertain starting point," Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston said in the first briefing since his Joint Agency Coordination Centre took responsibility for providing regular updates on the search Tuesday.

Teams are scouring a poorly mapped area of the southern Indian Ocean the size of Ireland as the power in the beacon batteries of the plane's "black boxes" dwindles.

"We don't know what altitude the aircraft was traveling at. We don't really know what speed it was going at other than some information that gives us some idea of the speed. It is a very inexact science," the former chief of Australia's defense force said.

He added that aircraft burn very little fuel at high altitude, so if the plane were traveling at 40,000 feet it would have flown a lot further than at a much lower altitude.

Malaysian investigators believe Flight 370 crashed in the southern Indian Ocean when it ran out of fuel, thousands of kilometers from the nearest airport, after disappearing from civilian radar on March 8. All of the 239 passengers and crew are assumed dead.

On Tuesday, Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein reiterated investigators' belief that the way Flight 370 flew before it disappeared from radar was consistent with "deliberate action" by someone on the plane.

Still, radio transmissions from the last contact the plane had with air-traffic controllers show nothing unusual in the minutes before it disappeared from radar, according to a transcript.

Australian authorities abruptly shifted the search zone in the southern Indian Ocean some 1,100 kilometers (680 miles) to the northeast last week, to about 1,850 kilometers west of Perth, based on new calculations of the radar data.

An international team of air-accident investigators are striving to piece together what caused Flight 370 to veer sharply away from its flight path to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, and go down thousands of kilometers away in the southern Indian Ocean.

"Good night Malaysian three seven zero" was the final communication from the aircraft at 1:19 a.m. March 8, two minutes before the last signal was received from its transponder, a device that helps controllers identify and locate the aircraft.

That response was different from "All right, good night," as a Malaysian civil aviation department official had previously reported.

"There is no indication of anything abnormal in the transcript," Mr. Hishammuddin, who is also Malaysia's acting transport minister, said in a statement.

Mr. Hishammuddin said investigators and Malaysian authorities remain of the opinion that until the plane left primary military radar coverage its operations "were consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane."

Malaysian authorities have said the plane was last spotted by military radar over the Strait of Malacca, hundreds of kilometers west of its original flight route over the Gulf of Thailand.

The mystery surrounding the plane's disappearance led the Montreal-based International Air Transport Association on Tuesday to call for better systems that can track aircraft in-flight.

The global airline-industry group also urged governments to use advance passenger data more effectively.

"Whether or not there is a security dimension to this tragedy, that two passengers could board an aircraft with fake passports rings alarm bells, " said Tom Tyler, IATA's director general, referring to the two Iranian nationals who boarded Flight 370 using stolen passports.

Now in its fourth week, the search for the Boeing 777-200 has yielded little except satellite images and aerial photographs of objects that haven't been linked to the missing plane. Numerous ships engaged in the hunt have hauled in only unrelated scraps of junk in an area where currents frequently bring floating garbage together.

"The recovery operation is probably the most challenging one that I have ever seen," Air Chief Marshal Houston said. "It isn't something that is necessarily going to be resolved in the next two weeks."

Authorities calculate they might have less than a week left before the plane's black-box flight recorders stop emitting signals that could help searchers locate them deep underwater.

Air Chief Marshal Houston said identifying any aircraft debris would mark a critical turning point in the search effort, allowing an underwater search--using more advanced technology--to begin. Conversely, if search teams don't find any wreckage on the ocean surface, it could take years to find the aircraft, he said.

He cited the example of an Air FranceAirbus A330 that plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. It took investigators almost two years to retrieve the plane's flight recorders, even though the plane was traveling on a well-established flight path when it crashed and searchers retrieved some aircraft debris within days.

"Inevitably, if we don't find wreckage on the surface, we are eventually going to have to probably, in consultation with everybody who has a stake in this, review what to do next," Air Chief Marshal Houston said.

The former defense chief's remarks contrasted with those of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who on Monday pledged to keep increasing the intensity of the search indefinitely. "If this mystery is solvable, we'll solve it," said Mr. Abbott.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak plans to visit Perth on Wednesday and Thursday in a show of support.

An Australian vessel carrying a U.S. Navy black-box locator that can detect flight-recorder signals left for the search area on Monday night from Perth after completing trials. Ocean Shield, a vessel built to operate in Antarctic weather, is expected to arrive in the search area by April 5--leaving teams as little as two days to locate the recorders in depths of some 2,000 to 4,000 meters (6,500 to 13,000 feet).

"In a world where our every move seems to be tracked, there is disbelief both that an aircraft could simply disappear and that the flight data and cockpit voice recorders are so difficult to recover," said Mr. Tyler, of the IATA, which represents some 240 international airlines.

Air Chief Marshal Houston said it took more than 60 years to find an Australian warship that sank to the bottom of the Indian Ocean in World War II--despite eyewitness accounts of the sinking from survivors aboard a German raider involved in the clash.

"Now, we've got much better technology and that wouldn't happen in this day and age, but we are working from a very uncertain starting point and I just wanted to reinforce that because it will take time," he said.

The warship HMAS Sydney was lost following a battle with the German raider HSK Kormoran in the Indian Ocean off the Western Australian coast on Nov. 19, 1941. It had 645 people on board and remains Australia's worst naval disaster. The ship was discovered on March 17, 2008, by a group of Australian volunteers shortly after they found the wreck of the Kormoran, which also sank.

Jake Maxwell Watts and Gaurav Raghuvanshi in Kuala Lumpur, Ross Kelly in Sydney and Robb M. Stewart in Perth contributed to this article.

Write to David Winning at david.winning@wsj.com and Rachel Pannett at rachel.pannett@wsj.com

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